Weathering child displacement
Authors: None The Lancet Planetary Health
Journal: The Lancet Planetary Health (2023)

Extreme weather-related events are major causes of forced migration, and it is widely acknowledged that climate change is and will increasingly drive more frequent and severe adverse weather events and add to the risk of displacements. Children are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of displacement. If separated from their carers or forced to travel alone, children are put at risk of injury and deprivation from potential long journeys over unsafe terrain and of mistreatment, abuse, or even trafficking by criminals. Being displaced can also cut children off from vital services like healthcare and education and jeopardize their longer-term development and wellbeing. If temporary accommodation conditions for displaced children are poor then they can face undernourishment, exposure to harsh environmental conditions or infectious disease outbreaks, and an absence of emotional support in traumatic circumstances. During a weather disaster a child's family might lose property and livelihoods, damaging their future chances to resettle and earn an income. Despite the heightened dangers, disaggregated data on child-specific displacements from extreme weather conditions are rarely available. A report co-produced by UNICEF, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, and Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, has for the first time estimated the number of children who are displaced globally by floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires, and how that picture could develop as the climate warms. An estimated 43·1 million children were internally displaced due to a weather-related disaster between 2016–2021—with the vast majority driven by flooding or storms. Risk modelling suggests that over the next 30 years riverine flooding could displace 96 million children, cyclonic winds 10·3 million, and storm surges 7·2 million. The risk to children from these extreme events is not evenly spread. Although, for example, the largest overall numbers of children displaced by flooding and storms were in China, India, and the Philippines—which have large populations and well-developed disaster evacuation responses—countries with lower capacity to respond to disasters, such as Somalia and Sudan, and small island nations, such as Vanuatu and Dominica, have seen the largest proportion of their child populations displaced. The findings of this report highlight that children are most vulnerable to lasting disruption from weather-related disasters in already precarious contexts, where economic, political, environmental, and historical dangers overlap. Sudan, for example, has been affected by heavy flooding in 2022, and again in 2023 amid an ongoing civil war that has displaced 2·6 million children. Nonetheless, the evidence is becoming clearer that climate change is amplifying the risks from extreme weather events and worsening humanitarian disasters. In 2022 the devastating floods in Pakistan affected more than 33 million people, leading to fatalities, wide destruction of buildings, infrastructure, livestock and crops, and the mass displacement of people. A rapid attribution study suggests that the record-breaking monsoon rainfall preceding the floods was likely made more intense by a warmer global climate. Serial droughts in east Africa since 2020—which now raise the risk of famine and further displacements—are estimated to have been made 100 times more likely in our anthropogenically-warmed global climate. In addition to acute pressures, longer-term climate driven risks—such as food insecurity, water scarcity and poor quality, extreme heat, desertification, and sea level rise—will likely become increasingly important drivers of child displacement in the future. Even under optimistic mitigation scenarios where global warming is kept below 2°C the climate change impacts will leave millions of children vulnerable to displacement. Investment in adaptation and resilience building could prevent displacement or lessen its impacts in some contexts, and a just means of funding that work in poorer countries could be through a loss-and-damages arrangement (although administering such a fund has already been stalled). While some degree of greater exposure to extreme weather events is now inevitable, poor outcomes for children are not. Adaptation as a global community demands a compassionate approach to children displaced by climate disasters that ensures their safe movement, continuity of health and education, and aid in resettling or in moving on, so that a young person's entire future is not undone by the misfortune of being caught in an increasingly common calamitous event.